1) Transitions in home are an important predictor of child well-being. Study examines contributions to changes in number of transitions for children based on population changes in marriage and cohabitation over the past 25 years, by maternal education. Using NSFG.

2) Rackin & Gibson-Davis studied transitions (in or out of relationships) that children are exposed to (but findings are similar for transitions out, hence, instability implications).

3) There is some evidence that the number of transitions for children has finally plateaued, after going up for decades (Brown, Stykes, & Manning, 2016). But, is this because cohabitation as context for children has become more stable? Has it?

4) Findings from Rackin & Gibson-Davis: Children born to more highly educated experience far fewer transitions (1/4th as many) than children born to low and moderately educated. Moderately educated catching up to less educated.

5) Overtime, there was an increase in number of transitions for children for both the mod and low education groups; this was driven by the huge increase in the prevalence of cohabitation vs. marriage for these groups.

6) The pace of transitions has slightly decreased, though, for cohabitation; but this is greatly offset by the increased prevalence of cohabitation. That’s a key part of what Rackin & Gibson-Davis are showing.

7) Among the highly educated, marriage has become, if anything, even more likely the context for children, and more stable over time. In fact, among the highly educated, only 7% of children born to the 2005-2010 cohort were born outside of marriages.

8) As the authors note:

“Although cohabitations among these mothers did become slightly more stable, the increased stability of cohabitation was not occurring fast enough to offset the expanded pool of children exposed to cohabitation.” (p. 13) The authors note a hope that cohabitation will eventually become more stable for children but it remains far less stable for now, and that for that to occur, “cohabitation churning would have to decrease much more rapidly than it has during the past 25 years.” (p. 14)

My take: This is an excellent study examining the intersection of SES, trends over time, and family transitions that impact children.

Saturday, July 14, 2018

The CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) put
out a report in May on
the demographics of cohabitation, with interesting contrasts among adults who
are cohabiting, married, or neither. The report is based on a large, representative,
national survey of U.S. adults aged 18 to 44, sampled between 2011 and 2015. To
conduct the analyses, the authors (Nugent and Daugherty) selected only adults
who had sexual intercourse with a partner of the opposite sex. They did that to
ensure the groups were comparable in some respects regarding their histories in
intimate relationships. The groups reflect those who were currently cohabiting,
married, or neither at the time of being surveyed.

Cohabitation,
Marriage, or Neither

The report shows that, as of 2015:

17.1% of women and 15.9% of men were cohabiting

44.9% of women and 43.5% of men were married

38.0% of women and 40.6% of men were unmarried, and
not cohabiting

This type of data does not address pathways over time, such
as how many among the current cohabiters will eventually marry or how many of
those not currently residing with a partner will eventually do either or
neither. However, the data do provide estimates of the number of times people
in the groups had cohabited outside of marriage up to the time they were surveyed.

Sixty-seven percent (67%) of those currently married had
cohabited before marriage with one or more partners.[i]
Many of those currently unmarried or not cohabiting had cohabited before.
Fifty-one (51.4%) of the women in that group had lived with one or more
partners before, and 42.9% of the men had done likewise. Doing a little math, we
estimate from the report that 64.5% of the entire sample has cohabited with a
romantic partner at some point outside of marriage. That’s not the percent of
people sampled who will cohabit outside of marriage at some point in their
lives, though. The lifetime percent for this group would, of course, be higher.
To get that number, you’d have to follow everyone in the sample until each person
had either cohabited or died. That could be a long wait. (It might be that
Facebook could eventually tell us those numbers.)

The data on premarital cohabitation history in this sample
will be an under-estimate because the marrieds make up a higher percentage of
the older people in that age range, and there is every reason to believe that
the youngest, non-marrieds in the sample are more likely to cohabit prior to
marriage than those who are older. Other estimates not based on this specific
report are that the percentage of people living together before tying the knot is
now at an all-time high of over 70%.[ii]
We believe this figure will go higher still. There remain some groups,
particularly the more traditionally religious,[iii]
who will not live together before marriage, but otherwise, cohabitation is
common and there is little stigma associated with it.

Thus, a very high percentage of people in the U.S. cohabit
outside of marriage. It is now normative behavior. Wendy Manning has
estimated that, “The percentage of women ages 19-44 who have ever
cohabited has increased by 82% over the past 23 years.” For those aged 30-34 in
2009-10, she has shown that 73%
of women had already cohabited with someone. If you combine such
numbers with the fact that, as Susan Brown has shown, there is a steady
increase in cohabitation among older adults (after the death of a spouse or
divorce),[iv]
it is easy to imagine that the number of people who will eventually cohabit
outside of marriage could reach 80%, or more.

Cohabitation has greatly increased in large measure because,
while people are delaying marriage to ever greater ages, they are not delaying
sex, living together, or childbearing. In fact, on the latter point, Manning
noted in her recent address to the Population Association of America that
almost all of the increase in
non-marital births in the U.S. since 1980 has taken place in the
context of cohabiting unions.

Cohabiting with more than one partner outside of marriage
has also gone steadily higher.[v]
The NCHS report does not demonstrate the trend, but the data reported do show that
44% of the currently-cohabiting group and 20% of the neither cohabiting nor
married group has already lived with two
or more partners. Ever higher levels of serial cohabitation mean that more
people are on one of the pathways strongly associated with risks for family
instability or divorce.[vi]
Prior research has shown that serial cohabitation is strongly associated with
economic disadvantage among unmarried couples,[vii]
lower odds of marriage, and increased odds of poor marital outcomes, but serial
cohabitation is growing rapidly among different population groups.[viii]

Increasing rates of cohabitation as well as serial
cohabitation might be of no special consequence except for the point noted above,
that many births now occur in cohabiting unions. Some percentage of these
couples have a long-term commitment similar to marriage, but, on average,
cohabiting parents are much more likely than married parents to break up,[ix]
resulting in increasing odds of family instability for children. Much of this
risk is due to selection, a subject we will come to below.

Other Characteristics
of these Groups

Other findings from the NCHS report are consistent with the
way that basic family patterns have increasingly diverged around cultural,
educational, and economic lines. For example:

47.9% of cohabiting women had household incomes
less than 150% of the federal poverty line compared to 25.6% of married women

36.1% cohabiting men had incomes less than 150%
of the federal poverty line compared to 21.2% of married men

25.2% cohabiting women had incomes over 300% of the
federal poverty line compared to 48.1% of marrieds

32.4% of cohabiting men had incomes over 300% of
the federal poverty line compared to 52.4% of marrieds

This is one of the more striking examples of the fact that a
lot of cohabiting women and men tend to be poor compared to married women and
men. The data on education follow the same pattern, of course. Married people
had the most education followed by those who are not married or cohabiting,
with cohabiting people reporting lower levels of education than the other two groups.
For example:

25.3% of cohabiting women had a bachelor’s
degree compared to 43% of married women

16.2% of cohabiting men had a bachelor’s degree
compared to 36.5% of married men

While the education levels of many of the cohabiters in this
sample will go higher over time, the findings from many studies show that cohabitation
(particularly with cohabiting relationships not leading directly to marriage) is
associated with being more disadvantaged, on average.[x]
The data are consistent with the story of a class divide around marriage and
cohabitation.[xi]

Attitudes and
Experiences

This NCHS report also presents differences in the three groups
based on attitudes and experiences about unmarried sex, cohabitation, and
having children outside of marriage. Not surprisingly, both of the non-married
groups are less traditional in their views than those who are married. These
findings are reflected in the table below from the report. [click on it to view it]

While there are clear differences, large majorities of every
group believe that having and raising children without being married is fine; this
is endorsed by the greatest number of cohabiters. Of course, that finding would
have been quite different decades ago. Marrieds are the most disapproving of
cohabitation outside of marriage, but even most of the married group agreed
that it is all right to do so.

Majorities of every group also believe that living together
before marriage may help prevent divorce. This is of particular interest to us
given our research related to this question.[xii]
The percentage believing this was highest for those currently cohabiting.

This notion has had wide acceptance since at least the mid-1990s,
when three-fifths of high school students believed that, “It is usually a good
idea for a couple to live together before getting married in order to find out
whether they really get along.”[xiii]
It is worth noting that there is virtually no evidence in support of this
belief. However, it is also fair to note that there used be a lot clearer
evidence to the contrary.

Regardless, we believe that there is considerable evidence
that some patterns of living together before marriage are associated with increased
risks for less successful marriages. We do think experiences and choices matter
for future outcomes. This assertion is mildly controversial among those who
study cohabitation. To be sure, there is a mountain of evidence for selection
in both who cohabits and who will cohabit in the riskier ways. What that means
is that people who are already at greater risk for worse outcomes in
relationships because of things like family background, disadvantage, or
individual vulnerabilities are also more likely to do any of the following: cohabit
and not marry, cohabit before having clear, mutual plans to marry, or cohabit
with a number of different partners over time. There is plenty of evidence of
other patterns in the NCHS report related to cohabiters being more select for
various relationship risks. Consider the following findings.

Relationship Risks Associated with Cohabitation

Cohabiters were more likely (74%) than those currently
married (56%) to have had sexual intercourse before the age of 18. Cohabiting
women were also more likely to report ever having an unintended birth (43.5%) compared
to married women (23.9%). These types of patterns are associated with life-long
risk factors already present in the lives of many people. Of course, you could
argue that such differences also reflect choices people make that have
potentially causal, life-altering consequences. Such debates are endless, but
we do not doubt a huge role for selection in all of this. And yet, we believe there
often are causal elements impacting life outcomes related to the experience of
cohabitation.

First, it has been shown that cumulative cohabiting experience
changes peoples’ beliefs about marriage.[xiv]
While that research is older, the theory behind the research is compelling. Much
research shows we learn from experiences and experiences change our beliefs. We
believe that the increase in cohabitation, serial cohabitation, and premarital
cohabitation has led to consistent downward trends in belief that marriage is special.

Second, cohabitation makes it harder to break up, net of
everything else. Because of the inertia
of living together, some people get stuck longer than they otherwise would in
relationships they might have left or left sooner. In fact, we believe some
people marry someone they would otherwise have left because cohabitation made
it too hard to move on. Inertia should be the greatest problem for couples who
had not decided beforehand on their future, such as by already having mutual
plans to marry (e.g., engagement) or, of course, by first marrying. While the
increased risk can be modest, the prediction is consistently supported with at
least seven
reports using six different samples, showing that those who start
cohabiting before deciding to marry report lower average marital quality and
are more likely to divorce.[xv]
This added risk is compounded by the fact that most couples slide into
cohabiting rather than make a clear decisions about what it means and what
their futures may hold.[xvi]

Third, cohabitation is increasingly a context for childbearing.
Since cohabiting parental unions are relatively unstable, the increasing
number of couples who
break up in such unions will mean more people entering future
relationships with the challenge of children in tow.

These ever-changing patterns in relationship and family
development are complex, and they do not operate in the same way for all. For
example, there is research
suggesting that cohabiting experiences may lead to more positive attitudes
about marriage among young, African American adults. More broadly, as Sharon
Sassler and Amanda Miller argue in Cohabitation
Nation, there are various social class disparities that impact
things like if and how soon a person will move in with a partner. Some pathways
will lead to different sets of outcomes for different people, and some people
have more ability (economic and personal) to avoid paths that increase the odds
of poor outcomes.[xvii]

The extraordinary changes of the past four decades reflect
how ordinary cohabitation has become. There is no a simple story here, only an
ever-unfolding one of increasingly complex families.

[i] It
cannot be determined from these data if this means that 67% would have
cohabited before marriage with their spouse, but presumably, that is a
reasonable estimate for those doing so.

[ii]
Hemez, P. & Manning, W. D. (2017). Thirty
years of change in women's premarital cohabitation experience.
Family Profiles, FP-17-05. Bowling Green, OH: National Center for Family &
Marriage Research. That’s for the United States, but the rates are similarly
high in all industrialized nations. In a recent address to the Population
Association of America, I believe Manning put that number at around 75%.

[iii] There
is a nuance here for this new report. The group that is excluded by the
selection criteria (about having had sexual intercourse with someone of the
opposite sex) are those in that age range who have neither married nor had
sexual intercourse up to this point in their lives. Because of that, the
estimate of 67% living together before marriage for this particular age range
at that point in history would be a little high. We cannot say how high but do
not doubt that the percent who will live together before marriage of the current
generation of young adults is now over 70%.

[ix] “Only
one out of three children born to cohabiting parents remains in a stable family
through age 12, in contrast to nearly three out of four children born to
married parents.”: Manning, W. D. (2015). Cohabitation
and child wellbeing. The Future of Children, 25(2), 51–66; see also McLanahan,
S., & Beck, A. N. (2010). Parental relationships in fragile families. The
Future of Children, 20(2), 17-37.; McLanahan, S., & Beck, A. N. (2010). Parental
relationships in fragile families. The Future of Children, 20(2),
17-37.

[x] It
is important to note that this type of data also cannot distinguish between
cohabiters who will transition into marriage with their current (or a future) cohabiting
partner and those who will not.

Thursday, April 26, 2018

Having a long-term view supports the ability to delay
gratification and invest in the future. Having a short-term view provides no
reason for delay and favors immediate gratification. These points are central
to understanding marriage and cohabitation, as well as how people manage money.

A recent study
examines the way financial time-horizons are impacted by relationship transitions,
specifically, going from being single to cohabiting and from cohabiting to
being married. Barbara Fulda and Philipp Lersch conducted their study using a
large data set in Australia, motivated by this question: Is there reason to be
concerned about the future financial prospects of aging Australians in a world where
marriage is declining and cohabitation is increasing? It’s a good question, and
their study is excellent.

Their foundational assumptions were these:

·People with longer time-horizons about finances will
save more for the future.

·Marriage and cohabitation have implications for time-horizons,
and likely impact financial behavior.

In their study, financial planning time-horizon was measured
with a question that asked, “In planning your saving and spending, which of the
following time periods is most important to you?” The question allowed
responses ranging from “The next week” to “More than 10 years ahead,” with many
options in between. Importantly, the analyses are not about actual long-term
savings. Rather, they examined what happens to this planning variable across relationship
transitions, with the plausible argument that changes in financial horizons would
reflect something about long-term financial outcomes.

Fulda and Lersch used a variant of what economist and
sociologists call (in near worshipful tones) “fixed-effects,” which I believe
to be a variant of what psychologists call “within-subjects effects.” Such
analyses take advantage of data sets with over-time measurements from the same
individuals; in this case, to capture changes from before to after specific
transitions. While such analyses do not control for all types of selection
(such as who is on this path or that path in the first place), they do control
for other aspect of selection. For example, individuals vary in conscientiousness,
and that could impact everything of interest here. Even without conscientiousness
being measured, the fixed-effects models will control for such variance because
of how people are being compared to themselves over time. This gives new
meaning to the phrase, “control yourself.” (Researcher
humor is the best humor.) Another example of this type of thinking can be
found in a paper by Galena Rhoades, myself, and Howard Markman on changes in
relationships across the transition into cohabitation (see here). I’ll
come back to that.

Fulda and Lersch found that cohabiting individuals had
longer financial time-horizons than singles, and that financial planning
horizons increased over the transition to cohabitation. There was mixed
evidence of people’s financial horizons increasing further during cohabitation.
In contrast, financial horizons did not increase when transitioning into
marriage.

In their words, “Cohabiting individuals’ financial planning
horizons thus had already increased prior to their transition into marriage.” Further,
“we did not find convincing evidence for a change in the financial planning horizon
before and after marriage, . . ..” That is, marriage “seems to contribute
little to a longer financial planning horizon relative to cohabitation.” My
quibble is on that point.

Fulda and Lersch believe the driver of the observed effects
is the development (or establishment) of increased commitment during
cohabitation. I think that is likely correct, but I also think the matter and
meaning of the timing is more complex.

Early in the discussion of their findings, Fulda and Lersch
make an important comment.

These
results can be interpreted as extending previous research on the following two
distinct groups of cohabiters: Those who intend to marry and those who do not.
Poortman and Mills (2012) showed that the first group resembles married couples
in their partnership characteristics. In this study, we expand on this finding
and show that financial planning horizons of cohabiting couples’ who eventually
get married remain stable as a result of their high commitment to their
relationship when they transition from cohabitation into marriage.

There are different types of cohabiting unions. Some are
like marriage, many are not; some become more like marriages over time, and then
turn into marriages. That’s part of why cohabitation is a more ambiguous (and
heterogeneous) relationship status than marriage. This is likely somewhat less
true in Australia[i]
than in the United States. because of a legal system that makes cohabitation
more like marriage there. Here in the United States, anyway, cohabitation
contains very little information about commitment. Marriage plans, however,
contain a lot of information.

Sociologist Susan Brown and colleagues havedrawn attention to the fact that cohabiting couples with plans to marry
tend to be, on average, a lot like married couples (see also, this). In a related vein, but differing in an
important way, my colleague Galena Rhoades and I have found that, among couples
who end up marrying, those who started
cohabiting only after having clear marriage plans (such as after engagement
or who move in together only after
marrying) tend to do better in marriage than those who had not decided the big question
about the future beforehand (for more on those studies, see here).
Deciding you want a V8 ahead of time
beats “I coulda had a V8” while already holding something else. (Want to take a
trip through memory lane on that? Here, knock yourself out.
That’s some ancient wisdom right there.)

Furthermore, we have found cohabiting
prior to engagement or marriage is associated with asymmetrically committed
relationships, and that such asymmetries do not appear to change after
marrying. And, as I’ve written before, asymmetrical commitment is not
good.

Fulda and Lersch do not, and likely could not, examine a variable
that estimates the timing of when couples who married developed their mutual plans
to marry. I expect that a lot of the action behind what they found lies there. In
addition, while they believe that the development of commitment between
partners is the most important mechanism in play, they also do not have a
measure of that to analyze. Thus, the measure of financial horizon is sort of doing
double duty in their thinking.

Coming back to the study noted earlier
by Galena Rhoades, me, and Howard Markman, we found that commitment itself—as
in dedication to one’s partner—tends to stop increasing after the transition
into cohabitation. It levels off, and not at the particularly high level.
Taking these points all together, Fulda and Lersch do not have a way to look at
the actual timing of changes in interpersonal commitment, nor can they look at
the exact timing of when mutual plans for marriage develop. It would be interesting
to look at their research question with access to such measures.

To be clear, I have little doubt that financial planning can
change with cohabitation. However, I suspect that Fulda and Lersch’s cohabitation-transition
effects are likely, and largely, a proxy for the effect of developing marriage
plans before cohabiting or while cohabiting. Either way, the effects Fulda and Lersch
are attributing solely to cohabitation seem mostly to be marriage effects
occurring before marriage. There is nothing nearly as re-organizing for a
relationship as deciding on, and setting plans for, a life together.

Cohabitation,
Marriage, and Time Horizons

I believe marriage effects start long before a couple walks
down the aisle. Similar effects can occur without marriage if a mutual and high level of commitment emerges. However, marriage
remains the strongest cultural signal encoding such a commitment.[ii]
Sure, some institutional effects of marriage will begin with the wedding, but the
wedding day typically celebrates changes in commitment that have already
occurred.

Fulda and Lersch concluded that concerns about the long-term
financial prospects of Australians may be overblown. Bolstering this conclusion
is the fact that the laws and mores in Australia make cohabitation a near functional
equivalent to marriage. I do believe it is a different deal there compared to the
United States. However, there are reasons to think that long-term implications of
cohabitation versus marriage may still be substantial for children, even in
societies where the two statuses have become close in legal equivalence. This fact
was recently documented by Brad Wilcox and Laurie DeRose with a multi-national data
set.[iii]

Marriage may eventually lose its status as the strongest
signal of commitment to “us with a future,” but I do not think that day has yet
arrived. Until marriage disappears, marriage effects will start before
marriage.

First published to the blog of the Institute for Family Studies on 4-9-2018.

[i]
As an aside, the first scholar to nail the issue of the fundamental ambiguity
of cohabitation was Jo Lindsay—an Australian research doing a qualitative
study on cohabitation first published in 2000 based on interviews in the
early 90s.

[iii] Wilcox and DeRose found a
consistent and seemingly large difference in family stability for children of
married versus cohabiting couples in many European countries; countries where
cohabitation with children has legal characteristics similar to marriage. The
larger story here is constantly unfolding into the future, but such findings
suggest that marriage still represents a different commitment to the future
than cohabitation.

Monday, March 26, 2018

This post is to provide citations relevant for some of the work Galena Rhoades and I (and colleagues) have conducted on the subject of premarital cohabitation, specifically, the prediction of a timing effect related to when couples moved in together and marital outcomes. Before any of these studies were conducted, we predicted that couples who cohabited only after engagement (or marriage) would, on average, do better in marriage than those who began to cohabit prior to having such clear, mutual plans to marry. This is the inertia hypothesis. It is explained clearly in the citations under “theory” below. This prediction has found support in every place where we know it possible to test, including findings in 7 studies using 6 different samples. For a non-technical summary of this line of reasoning, click here. For an annotated summary of our research on cohabitation, including abstracts and thinking from study to study, click here. [This is like a walking tour through our line of research on this issue and related subjects.]My goal here is to give easy access to relevant citations. Where possible, I give links that provide access to the entire article.

Friday, March 16, 2018

Here are links to the February 2018 issue of the Journal of Family Psychology. The links I have included are all the ones pertinent to military families. You can access the abstracts here with the links provided.

Friday, February 9, 2018

I’m sure there is some lesson about commitment in most any
Super Bowl, but I think sports commenter Colin Cowherd (@ColinCowherd)
gets at something special in his observation about Super Bowl LII, which you
can find in this video onYouTube.

I’ll describe the key point, but if you have a few minutes
and want to take it in, Cowherd makes his point with style. From 0:00 to 2:47
will do the job.

Before going to substance, I want to declare my conflicts of
non-interest. I’m neither a fan of the
Eagles nor of the Patriots. I’m not much of a football fan, except that I do
now hope the Broncos get Foles for next year. Further, I didn’t care about who
would win this game until it was going; and once it was, I started rooting for the
Eagles. I’ll cop to that.

What Cowherd Observed

Commitment is about making a choice to give up other
choices. It’s about deciding. Clear decisions anchor commitments, and the
timing of those clear decisions often matters. In contrast, sliding through key
moments is letting stuff happen to you, and it can result in losing options
before making a choice. I’m usually making these points about marriage and
family, but they apply to everything important. Cowherd gets at what is one of
the most important insights about commitment that Galena Rhoades and I are
often highlighting.

Cowherd focuses on the Eagles decision to go for it on fourth
down, trailing by 1 point, with 5:40 left on the clock. Teams usually punt in
that circumstance, and I thought the Eagles would do just that in the hopes of stopping
New England and getting the ball back. (There’s a growing thought around the
NFL that teams should usually be going for it on 4th-and-1, by the
way, but that’s not been the convention. It might start to be.) My youngest son
thought they would go for it. He was right, and he’s the one who got me to
watch Cowherd give his analysis.

Of that moment, on 4th-and-1, Cowherd says, “That
decision wasn’t made there.”

I think he’s exactly right. Cowherd observed that the Eagles
didn’t even call a time out to think about it, and on a play that he believes is
one of the gutsiest calls in Super Bowl history. Instead, the Eagles already
knew what they were going to do. In fact, they’d made a similarly bold 4th
and 1 conversion in the first half, when the Eagles’ quarterback Nick Foles
became the receiver for a touchdown. I’ve watched enough football to know that
if you are going for it on 4th-and-1, you are usually trying a brute
force attempt, not some utterly surprising trick play.

Here’s the good part. Cowherd attributes the Eagles’ game
play to a decision made two weeks before by the Philadelphia coaches in a
meeting. A decision that was talked about, thought about, and that guided the
Eagles minds and motivation over the past couple weeks. They had pre-decided to
go for it, all the time, every time. It’s fair for you to think I have now
become totally mired in sport’s cliché drivel. You know, “they left it all on
the field.” “They came to play.” “They dug deep.” Could be, but I think Cowherd’s
right to imply that this is not that. Or, at the least, I’m going to suggest
it’s more than that.

As Cowherd notes, The Patriots have a history of getting
behind and then coming back and destroying the other team, often in a final
drive at the end of the game. It’s kind of a brand. They’ve turned the tide
more often than you’re ever going to see something like detergent commercials
in Super Bowl games.

New England is a widely disliked team for a number of
reasons, and I think the biggest reason goes beyond a few notable, naughty behaviors.
It’s not just balls that get deflated around New England. It’s teams. It’s
cities. I think what people feel about the Patriots is archetypal. New England
represents the relentless challenges of life that too often wear us down and
wipe us out. They crush our dreams as time is running out. That’s who the
Eagles were playing, and that is important here.

Cowherd observes that the Eagles had decided, two weeks before,
this:

“We’re not going to be Atlanta. We’re not going to outplay
New England and lose.”

“We’re not going to be Jacksonville. We’re not going to
outplay New England and lose.”

“We’re not going to be Pittsburgh. We’re not going to
outplay New England and lose.”

The Eagles had pre-decided they were going to play this game
with a highly disciplined abandon. They ran some risky plays. They kept pushing
hard even when ahead. The Eagles weren’t waiting for the Patriots to happen to
them in the usual way of life.

Why isn’t this a typical sport’s cliché? Because of the
timing of the key decision.

Timing is a Lot of the Things

Timing may not be everything, but timing is a lot of the things that matter most.
Before my metaphorical final drive (the next section of this piece), two quick
points about timing and commitment from my area of theory and research: One point
is about parental commitment and babies and the other is about
the timing of commitment relative to living together.

When a couple is having a child, it matters a great deal
whether or not they had decided before conception if they were doing life together. A couple can decide after a
baby is on the way to build a life together, but that’s a decision being made on
4th down, during a time-out, in the middle of the pressure of the
big game. A decision about the future is best made when the future is not
already here.

When a couple moves in together, it matters whether or not they’ve
already decided they are committed to the future--beforehand. Living together
makes it harder to break up, and a lot of people don’t see this until they are
deep into the game and behind on the scoreboard. As our research has shown,
those who marry, or who have at least gotten engaged, before moving in together
tend to do better once married. Does that mean the other couples are doomed?
Surely not. It’s an edge, an advantage. Nothing is a slam dunk (oops, wrong
sport!). Anyway, the point is the same as the one above about babies. It helps
when the big decision about the future was made before the two people were already
constrained by their situation.

When it comes to consequential moments that can be life
altering, it’s best if you can say, “That decision wasn’t made there.”

This Gets It

There are a lot of times in life where you are going to fail
because you’ve not decided ahead of the critical moment what you are about and what
you are committed to do. I don’t mean you can anticipate everything that will
happen. You can’t. Sometimes, you need to change something in your pre-decided
plan. Sometimes, you need to call an audible or else you’ll get mauled.

I also don’t mean to suggest that clear commitments at the
right time for the right reason always insulate you from loss. None of us knows
how the game is going to play out, including in our relationships. It is a fact
recently demonstrated that you can play out your game plan, executed relatively
well, produce 505 yards of offense—and still lose.

But in the main, those who have decided beforehand what they
are going after, and how deeply they are committed to achieving it, will come
out ahead, whether it is in marriage or work or anything else that matters. Why?
Because you are not chronically trying to decide—in the moment—what would have
been better decided beforehand.

About Me

I am a research professor who conducts studies on marriage and romantic relationships. Along with my colleagues, I also develop materials to help people in their relationships based on research.
In addition to academic publications, I have written or co-written a number of books (see below). Together with colleagues Howard Markman and Natalie Jenkins, I head up a team at PREP, Inc. that produces various materials for use in marriage and relationship education. Howard Markman, Galena Rhoades, and I head up our research team at the University of Denver.

Why Sliding vs. Deciding?

Sliding vs. Deciding is a theme that comes out of my study of commitment and my work with my major colleague in this work, Galena Rhoades. I believe “sliding vs. deciding” captures something important about how romantic relationships develop. The core idea is that people often slide through important transitions in relationships rather than deciding what they are doing and what it means. For example, sociologists Wendy Manning and Pamela Smock conducted a qualitative study of cohabiting couples and found that over one half of couples who are living together didn’t talk about it but simply slid into doing so, paralleling prescient observations from Jo Lindsey in 2000. In our large quantitative study of cohabitation, we have found that most cohabiters report a process more like sliding into cohabitation than talking about it and making a decision about it.

In contrast to sliding, commitments that we are most likely to follow through on are based in decisions. In fact, commitment is making a choice to give up other choices. A commitment is a decision. Do we always need to be making a decision about things? I hope not. But when something important in life is at stake, I believe that deciding will trump sliding in how things turn out.

One of the most important implications of the concept of sliding vs. deciding is when this theme is married to our work and thought on the depths of ambiguity in relationship formation these days and our ideas about inertia. What people are often now seeing is that they are sliding through relationship transitions that cause them to increase constraints and lose options before (or without) noticing that they have just entered a more constrained pathway. As a result, we believe that many people are too often giving up options before they have made a choice. That is far from making a choice to give up other choices. That's losing options because one is not noticing an important, or even potentially high cost slide, is not what solid commitment formation is about.

Three of the most important theory papers written by me and Galena Rhoades are accessible above at the links: "Sliding vs. Deciding: Inertia and the Premarital Cohabitation Effect", "Commitment: Functions, Formation, and the Securing of Romantic Attachment," and the link labeled "SvD Transition and Risk Model."